When tucking her into bed at night, she’d stroke the little girl’s genitals and tell her dirty stories.

For conduct a judge called “despicable and twisted,” a 58-year-old Windsor mother was sentenced Thursday to three years in jail. She was convicted of sexual assault and procurement of a child by a parent for the purpose of sexual activity for multiple acts that occurred more than a decade ago.

“This offence is especially depraved,” Superior Court Justice Bruce Thomas said Wednesday in sentencing the woman. The woman, who can’t be named to protect her daughter’s identity, stared straight ahead like in a trance. She denies the sexual abuse ever happened.

The crimes came to light when the daughter, as a teenager, disclosed to a counsellor what had happened in her childhood.

The girl, now 17, remembers a man entering her life in Grade 2. One day her mother walked her home after school and the man was in their apartment. Her father was at work.

The very next day the man was back. The mother admits to undressing her daughter in front of the man. The daughter says much more happened.

The girl says she was invited into the bedroom. She, her mother and the man were all naked on the bed. The man touched her genitals. He then had her touch her mother in the same way. Her mother encouraged her to touch the man’s penis and go along with everything else he suggested.

The same scene played out at least 10 more times. She would perform oral sex on the man. Her mother would watch.

The girl recalls pornographic movie clips paying on the television during some of the encounters. Her mother and the man would act out what was on the screen.

Her mother kept seeing the man until she was in Grade 5. One day at the end of the school day, he arrived in a van with her mother to get her. They went to a motel, stopping along the way at McDonald’s to pick up food. At the motel, when the pornographic movie came on the television, the girl went into the bathroom and ate her food on the floor.

The girl had successfully avoided the abuse for many months. Sometime in the third grade, through exposure to friends, she grew reluctant to participate in the sex acts. When she would find the man in her apartment after school, she would feign illness and go to her room. Her mother never pressed it again.

Police were unsuccessful in finding the man. If the mother knows his identity, she never gave it up.

While denying the abuse, the mother says the man her daughter remembers is someone she met on the bus one day. She said she envisioned a life with him if her husband ever left her.

Thomas called the mother’s explanation “frankly absurd.”

Thomas conceded the mother had a “difficult” background. She grew up in British Guyana and had no formal schooling. She came to Canada at 25 to visit her sister and found herself a month later in an arranged marriage to a much-older man whose family never accepted her.

Her loveless marriage was marked by poverty. As her husband’s health failed, she took jobs as a cleaning lady. Her husband, 73 and physically disabled, relies on her for care.

The husband was one of the reasons held out by defence lawyer Evan Weber for a sentence of house arrest.

Assistant Crown attorney Kim Bertholet, calling the mother’s conduct an abuse of trust “in the highest degree,” asked for a prison sentence of four to five years.

The woman will be on the national sex offender registry for 20 years, meaning she must check in with police whenever she moves so they can track her. She can’t ever own weapons and must provide a blood sample for the national DNA databank used by police to solve crimes.

The daughter, an only child, lives with a boyfriend. She was surprised when her admission to her counsellor in 2011 led to her mother’s arrest. She dropped out of high school, in part because of the stress of having to testify at a preliminary hearing and then a trial.

Before her mother was led out of the courtroom by a police officer, the girl walked over to say goodbye. They exchanged a few, emotionless words.

Moments earlier, the girl delivered a statement to the court about the impact the abuse had on her life. In what the judge called her usual “articulate” manner, the girl’s statement ended with the words, “I hope I can find closure and go on.”

Colleen Eve tearfully recalled the mother she barely knew.
She was only three back in 2000 when her father John told her mother, Chatham-Kent OPP Sgt Marg Eve would not be coming home. Eve was critically injured when a truck smashed into three cruisers parked by the side of the road after stopping a suspect vehicle.